Los Angeles Noir (15 page)
Mostly, he watched television. In the movies, he noticed, people who got shot were never paralyzed. They bore their wounds with a grimace and rose to their feet, chasing after their enemies; or they died dignified deaths, giving long speeches before they closed their eyes forever. No gunslinger ever suffered the humiliation of sitting all day in a vinyl chair, trapped with the vinegar smell of his inert legs, forced to endure the protracted lamentations of his mother and his pregnant girlfriend, who both wondered how they would feed the baby, once it was born.
After a week rooted like an angry weed to the floors of the bungalow, Danny finally got fed up and decided to wander the neighborhood in his wheelchair, joining the parallel universe of mumbling bottle collectors and lunatics who made their home on the sidewalks. He inched along slowly, deliberately, pushing hard to roll the wheelchair over the concrete squares where tree roots had raised the sidewalk, and up the steep ramps that were cut into the curb at each corner. It was during one of these excursions that, one afternoon, three blocks on from his house, he coasted down a slight slope, half hoping he would gain speed, lose control, and bounce into traffic. Instead, he came to a stop at the construction site across the street from his old elementary school. The dirt trenches were gone and the ground was covered with a vast table of concrete. Twice he had been shot here and left for dead. His manhood had arrived and slipped away from one moment to the next. A sense of injustice rose through his body, a muffled crimson scream. He stared directly into the yellow, fiery light of the sun, then turned away and cried, burying his hot face in his hands, weeping until his chest felt as weak and drained as his legs. Finally, he sat up, opening his eyes to the sight of girls running up and down the playground across the street, skipping with strong, healthy legs.
Danny was headed back home, very slowly, because his arms were tired of pushing, when he found his path blocked by a pair of standing denim pants on the sidewalk. They belonged to a rather large and roundish teenage girl.
“You prick,” she said.
Danny looked up and gave her a quizzical, annoyed look. “Get out of my way,” he mumbled, without much conviction.
“Who’s going to take care of Beto, you prick?” The girl reached into the backpack that dangled from her shoulder, a pink affair decorated with a pouting Betty Boop, and produced a small chrome gun, barely bigger than the palm of her hand. “Who’s going to take care of him, you prick?”
Danny grabbed the rubber tires of his wheelchair and pushed backward, first calmly and then with panic, as the girl raised her toy-sized gun and pointed it at him. He looked at the tiny opening of the gun’s barrel and pushed harder, but couldn’t get any distance between him and the girl, who kept marching toward him, mascara rivers racing down her cheeks. He tried to turn around, bouncing the chair and its wheels the way a therapist at the hospital had taught him, but he succeeded only in tipping the chair over, falling to the ground with a thud and a crash, his cheek crushed against the cement sidewalk.
Without hearing the gunshots, he felt the impact of the bullets on his body, the first striking him near the waist, the second at the base of the neck, sending a starburst of blue light across his eyelids. His skull became a bell made of bone. All at once, everything turned mercifully quiet.
He slipped into a dream in which he saw himself sprawled on the sidewalk, being lifted by men in black suits, the girl with the Betty Boop backpack standing against a nearby tree, sucking her thumb. Small chunks of silver and brass dripped from his back. He saw Pedro’s brother standing waist-high in a ditch, his arms raised in a plea:
Help me.
Elliot came to place a finger inside Danny’s first wound, the one in his cheek, wiggling the finger about like a worm. Danny shook his head and tried to push him away, and startled awake to see he was inside an ambulance, a paramedic’s latex gloves pulling back his eyelids. “Hey, Louie, we got him back!” the paramedic shouted. Danny passed out, tumbling into a warm dreamlessness, and then woke up again, alone, months later, in a room with green walls. For a few minutes he listened to the beep of a machine that echoed his own heartbeat until the steady, soft sound made him drowsy and he closed his eyes again.
When Detective Sanabria came to the Children’s Hospital some time later, he spent a good two hours at the foot of Danny’s bed. He felt especially useless before the sight of this boy’s prone body. Sanabria was beginning to question his place in the world, the assumptions about goodness, strength, and perseverance that had informed his life up to now; the hours of study in community college, his struggles at Cal State L.A. in classes like Applied Psychology and Urban Criminology, his monklike devotion to the reading of prolix police manuals that had ended with his consecration as detective. Here on the bed before him was a boy who had managed to get himself shot not once, but three times, twice with Sanabria looking after him, as it were. The girl with the gun in her Betty Boop backpack was in juvie, learning to draw pictures of weeping girl-clowns from her fellow inmates, and as unwilling as the rest of the knuckleheads to give up the name of the person who had sold her the gun. The gun traffickers operated a machinery of violence that churned up the fertile ground in Detective Sanabria’s corner of East Hollywood. He saw them as blood merchants filling a charnel house with the bones of children, stacking femurs and punctured skulls harvested from the streets, lining their foul clothing with the quarters, the nickels, and the rolled-up dollar bills of children.
The doctors’ prognosis was that Danny would never again awaken, that the forever of his wheelchair had become the forever of his sleep. Detective Sanabria stood up from his chair, walked over to the bed, and stood over the boy. He kissed Daniel “Danny” Cruz Jr. on the forehead, and then painted an invisible cross there with his thumb, a gesture the detective’s own Mexican mother annoyingly repeated each time they parted.
“God, I hate this fucking hospital,” he said, and left.
Two weeks later, Danny was awakened by a distant, highpitched wail, and saw a fuzzy object at the foot of his bed, a human-like figure that persisted in its unfocused, blurry state, until he blinked several times and it began to take form: First he saw Sandra, her face bloated and paler than he remembered, and then the infant she cradled in her arms, a baby girl with an even chunkier face and a broad, flat nose. “What’s going on?” he said abruptly, causing Sandra to startle and look up at him, and the baby to stop crying and look at him too.
“You’re awake!” Sandra called out, as the baby began to gnaw at her own wrist with toothless gums, sucking with a cracking sound that was like bubble gum popping. For a moment, Danny was hypnotized by the sight of the baby, by the two pink barrettes attached to her thin black hair, the way her jaws moved as she chewed, and by the flower-bud mouth that was revealed when her wrist fell away.
Suddenly, he felt the urge to sit up, to lift his back off the bed. He grabbed hold of the aluminum bars at his side, rose up, and felt the blood rush to his head, his eyes beginning a slow roll backwards, until he shook out the dizziness. Without saying a word, Sandra passed the child to him and he held her, feeling her tiny chest rise and fall against his shoulder. He listened to the fast, desperate pant of her breathing, and felt the warm flow of baby drool as it soaked through his hospital smock and dripped down his chest, past the wounds near his ribs.
Danny raised a finger and gently tapped her nose. For a moment, he worried he might hurt her, that the needles in his wrists might stick her, but the fear passed. Time ticked forward with no other sound than the occasional trumpetblaring of Sandra blowing her nose, and he noticed that the frame of the hospital room window was being filled, quickly, with the tangerine hue of a disappearing California afternoon. Danny saw his daughter’s future unfolding, the yellow march of many suns across the heavens, and the slow, slow progress of the months and years they would live together in the waking world, an epoch of quiet never broken by the sound of gunfire.
Sandra wiped her nose and got up from the chair, then looked at the baby and broke into a bright, childlike smile of wonder. “She fell asleep in your arms!”
Danny listened to his daughter’s breathing grow steady, and felt rhythmic puffs of wind beating softly against his chest. He kept very still.
N
obody walked from Echo Park to Downtown. Only a walkin fool.
But in the fifteen years I’d lived in L.A., I’d only met a few walkin fools. L.A. people weren’t cut out for ambulation, as my friend Sidney would have said if he were here. But the people of my childhood weren’t here. They were all back in Rio Seco.
The only walkin fools here were homeless people, and they walked to pass the time or collect the cans or find the church people serving food, or to erase the demons momentarily. They needed air passing their ears like sharks needed water passing their gills to survive.
But me—I’d been a walkin fool since I was sixteen and walked twenty-two miles one night with Grady Jackson, who was in love with my best friend Glorette. I’d been thinking about that night, because someone had left a garbled message on my home phone around midnight—something about Glorette. It sounded like my brother Lafayette, but when I’d listened this morning, all I heard was her name.
Grady Jackson and his sister were the only other people I knew from Rio Seco who lived in L.A. now, and I always heard he was homeless and she worked in some bar. I had never seen them here. Never tried to. That night years ago, when he stole a car, I’d wanted to come to L.A., where I thought my life would begin.
But I had thought of Grady Jackson every single day of my life, sometimes for a minute and sometimes for much of the evening, since that night when I realized that we were both walkin fools, and that no one would ever love me like he loved Glorette.
I came out my front door and stepped onto Delta, then turned onto Echo Park Avenue. My lunch meeting with the editor of the new travel magazine
Immerse
was at 1:00. I had drunk one cup of coffee made from my mother’s beans, roasted darker than the black in her cast-iron pan. When I went home to Rio Seco, she always gave me a bag. And I had eaten a bowl of cush-cush like she made me when I was small—boiled cornmeal with milk and sugar.
All the things I’d hated when I was young I wanted now. I could smell the still-thin exhaust along the street. It smelled silver and sharp this early. Like wire in the morning, when my father and brothers unrolled it along the fenceline of our orange groves.
All day I would be someone else, and so I’d eaten my childhood.
When I got close to Sunset, I saw the homeless woman who always wore a purple coat. Her shopping cart was full with her belongings, and her small dog, a rat terrier, rode where a purse would have been. She pushed past me with her head down. Her scalp was pink as tinted pearls.
At Sunset, I headed toward Downtown.
Downtown, receptionists and editors always said, “Parking is a bitch, huh?” I always nodded in agreement—I bet it was a bitch for them. If someone said, “Oh my God, did you get caught up in that accident on the 10?” I’d shake my head no. I hadn’t.
And I never took the bus. Never. Walking meant you were eccentric or pious or a loser—riding the bus meant you were insane or masochistic and worse than a loser.
I had a car. Make no mistake—I had the car my father and brothers had bought me when I was twenty-two and graduating from USC. They wanted to make sure I came home to Rio Seco, which was fifty-five miles away. My father was an orange grove farmer and my brothers were plasterers. They drove trucks. They bought me a Chevy Corsica, and I always smiled to think of myself as a pirate.
I was like a shark too—or like the homeless people. I needed to walk every day, wherever I was, traveling for a piece or just home. I needed constant movement. And every time I walked somewhere, I thought of Grady Jackson. Now that I was thirty-five, it seemed like my mind placed those rememories, as my mother called them, into the days just to assure me of my own existence.
I’d have time in the Garment District before lunch. One thing about walkin fools—they had to have shoes.
I had on black low-heeled half-boots today, and flared jeans, and a pure white cotton shirt with pleats that I’d gotten in Oaxaca. It was my uniform, for when I had to move a long way through a city. Boots, jeans, and plain shirt, and my hair slicked back and held in a bun. Nothing flashy, nothing too money or too poor. A woman walking—you wanted to look like you had somewhere to go, not like you were rich and ready to be robbed, and not like a manless searching female with too much jewelry and cleavage.
Down Sunset, the movement in my feet and hips and the way my arms swung gently and my little leather bag bumped my side calmed me. My brain wasn’t thinking about bills or my brother Lafayette, who’d just left his wife and boys, or that Al Green song I’d heard last night that made me cry because no one would ever sing that to me now and slide his hands across my back, like the boys did when we were at house parties back in Rio Seco. When we were young.
“I’m so glad you’re mine,”
Al sang, and his voice went through me like the homemade mescal I’d tried in Oaxaca, in an old lady’s yard where only a turkey watched us.
No one I knew now, in this life, at all the parties and receptions and gallery openings, felt like that—like the boys with us back home, in someone’s yard after midnight. Throats vibrating close to our foreheads, hands sliding across our shoulder blades. Girl, just—Just lemme get a taste now. Come on.
When I was home lately, I had trouble working. I looked at old things like my mother’s clothespins and a canvas bag I used to wear across my shoulder when we picked oranges in my father’s grove.
But walking, I was who I had become—a travel writer everyone wanted to hire.
I’d written about the Bernese Oberland for
Conde Nast
, about Belize for
Vogue
, about Brooklyn for
Traveler
.
I passed vacant lots tangled with morning glories like banks of silver-blue coins, and the sheared-off cliffs below an old apartment complex, where shopping carts huddled like ponies under the Grand Canyon.
I looked at my watch. 8:45. I smelled all the different coffees wending through the air from doughnut shops and convenience stores. Black bars were slid aside like stiffened spiderwebs. Every morning in late summer, my mother and I would brush aside the webs from the trees in our yard, the ones made each night by desperate garden spiders. Here, everyone was desperate to get the day started and make that money.
My cell rang while I was waiting for the light at Beaudry.
“FX?” It was Rick Schwarz, the editor.
“Yup,” I said.
“So what does that stand for?” He laughed. He was in his car.
“It stands for my name, Rick.”
He laughed again. “We still on for 1:00? Clifton’s Cafeteria?”
“Sounds fine,” I said.
“So—I don’t know what you look like. You never have a contributor’s photo.”
“I look absolutely ordinary,” I said, my body lined up with a statue in the window of a botanica. “See you at 1.”
I stood there for a minute, the sun behind me, tracing the outline of the Virgen de Soledad. These people must be from Oaxaca, because this virgin, with her black robe in a wide triangle covered with gold, her face severe and impassive, was their patron saint. I had prayed before her in a cathedral there, because my mother asked me to do so each place I went. My mother’s house was full of saints.
Across Beaudry, I could see the mirrored buildings glinting like sequined disco dresses in the hot sun. My phone rang again.
“Fantine?”
“Yes, Papa,” I said. I tried to keep walking, but then he was silent, and I had to lean against a brick building in the shade.
“That your tite phone?” he said. My little phone—my cell.
“Yes, Papa.”
“You walk now?”
“I’m going downtown,” I said. “Does Mama want something? Some toys?” I could stop by the toy district today, if my nephews wanted something special.
My father said, “Fantine. Somebody kill Glorette. You better come home,
oui
. Tomorrow. Pay your respect, Fantine.”
Then he hung up.
No one ever called me by my name. I had been FX Antoine for ten years, since I decided to become a writer. Only my family and my Rio Seco friends knew my name at all.
That was why I’d always loved L.A., especially Downtown. No one knew who I was. No one knew what I was. People spoke to me in Spanish, in Farsi, in French. My skin was the color of walnut shells. My hair was black and straight and held tightly in a coil. My eyes were slanted and opaque. I just smiled and listened.
But Glorette—even if she’d worn a sack, when she walked men would stare at her. They wanted to touch her. And women hated her.
Glorette had skin like polished gold, and purple-black eyes, and brows like delicate crow feathers, and her lips were full and defined and pink without lipstick. She was nearly iridescent—did that fade when blood stopped moving? Now she was dead.
I bit my lip and walked, along Temple and down to Spring Street, where crowds of people moved quickly, all of them with phone to ear, or they spoke into those mouthpieces like schizophrenics. And the homeless people were talking quietly to themselves or already shouting. Everyone was speaking to invisible people.
My father’s voice had lasted only a few minutes.
I don’t
talk into no plastic and holes
, he always said.
Like breathin on a pincushion.
He’d said Glorette was dead.
I stopped at the El Rey, one of the tiny shacks with a dropdown window that sold burritos and coffee. My father, when he came from Louisiana to California and began working groves, learned to eat burritos instead of biscuits and syrup. I wanted horrible coffee, not good coffee like my mother’s, like Glorette’s mother’s, like all the women I’d grown up with on my small street. All of them from Louisiana, like my parents. The smell of their coffee beans roasting every morning, and the sound of the tiny cups they drank from even after dark, on the wood porches of our houses, when the air had cooled and the orange blossoms glowed white against the black leaves.
But the man who handed me the coffee smiled, and his Mayan face—eyes sharp and dark as oleander leaves, teeth square as Chiclets—looked down into mine. I put the coins in his palm. Pillows of callus there. I sipped the coffee and he said, “
Bueno, no?
”
So good—cinnamon and nighttime and oil. “
Que bueno,
” I said. “
Gracias.
” He thought I was Mexican.
Then tears were rolling down my face, and I ducked into an alley. Urine and beer and wet newspaper. Glorette was dead. I closed my eyes.
Glorette—when we were fourteen, we walked two miles to high school, and her long stride was slow and measured as a giraffe’s. Her legs long and thin, her body small, and the crescent of white underneath the purple-black iris that some-how made her seem as if she were sleepily studying everyone. Her hair to her waist, but every day I coiled it for her into a bun high on her skull. All day, men imagined her hair down along her back, tangled in their hands. I wore mine in a bun because I didn’t want it in my way while I did my homework and wrote my travel stories about places I’d made up. Always islands, with hummingbirds and star fruit because I liked the name.
Every boy in Rio Seco loved her. But I talked too much smack. I couldn’t wait to leave. If someone said, “Fantine, you think you butter, but your ass is Nucoa like everybody else,” I’d say, “Yet all you deserve is Crisco.”
Grady Jackson had fallen for Glorette so hard that he stole a car for her, and nearly died, but she felt nothing for him, and he’d never forgiven her.
Grady Jackson and his sister Hattie were from Cleveland by way of Mississippi. Grady. He hated his name. He was in my math class, though I was two years younger, and he wrote
Breeze
on top of his papers. Mr. Klein gave them back and said, “Write your proper name.”
Grady said to me, “I want somebody call me Breeze. Say, I’m fittin to hat up, Breeze, you comin? Cause my mama name me for some sorry-ass uncle down in Jackson. Jackson, Missippi, and my name Jackson. Fucked up. And she in love with some fool name Detroit.”
Glorette. We were freshmen, and a senior basketball player who had just moved here was talking to her every day. “Call me Detroit, baby. Where I’m from. Call me anything you want, cause you fine as wine and just my kind.”
But Detroit had no car. Glorette smiled, her lips lifting only a little at the corners, and turned her head with the heavy pile of hair on top, her neck curved, and Detroit, who had reddish skin and five freckles on top of each cheek, said, “Damn, they grow some hella fine women out here in California.”
He didn’t even look at me.
That weekend, I was on my front porch when Grady Jackson pulled up in a car. My brothers Lafayette and Reynaldo had an old truck, and they jumped down from the cab. “Man, you got a Dodge Dart? Where the hell you get the money? You ain’t had new kicks for a year. Still wearin them same Converse.”
Grady looked up at me. “Glorette in your house? Her mama said she ain’t home.”
I saw his heavy brown cheeks, the fro that wouldn’t grow no matter how he combed it out, and his T-shirt with the golden sweat stains under his arms. Should have just called himself
Missippi
and made fun of it, learned to rap like old blues songs and figured himself out. But Cleveland had already messed him up. I said, “She’s home. She’s waiting for Detroit to call her after his game.”
He spun around and looked at Glorette’s house, across the dirt street from mine, and said, “She think that fool gonna take her to L.A.? She keep sayin she want to go to L.A. I got this ride, and I’m goin. You know what, Fantine? Tell her I come by here and I went to L.A. without her. Shit.”
Then Lafayette said to him, “Grady, man, come in the barn and get a taste.”
My brothers had hidden a few beers in the barn. When Grady went with them, I didn’t even hesitate. I’d wanted to go to Los Angeles my whole life. I got into the Dart and lay down in the backseat.